It’s about time … get rid of PDFs from websites.
Adobe has bloated their PDF Reader client software so much that I prefer not to open PDF files on websites or, in an extreme case, when I don’t have a choice, I search for the url in Google and then use Google’s “View as HTML” option on that PDF file.
I’ve noticed this shift in people’s temperments in lots of places. The latest being Om Malik … he clearly lets you know if his link will leads to a PDF document file (at which point, I don’t go forward) … I could be wrong in gauging the man’s issues with PDF’s … but I’ll take my biased view and live longer, hopefully.
Believe me … people are inherently lazy, but not dumb … techy types on the internet doubly so. I’ll do the extra work of going the Google’s “View as HTML” route but will not stand aside and watch my entire system grind to a halt as Acrobat loads.
Before you crack a joke on my antiquated machine … it’s a decent Pentium M with a half gig of ram.
Update: Read this other post to get a Firefox extension to work around default loading of Acrobat for PDF files.